What are you most comfortable with? If you must be lumped into one binary gender, is there one you feel more ok with being lumped into? For instance, if you are distinctly transmasculine or a demiboy, you might be more comfortable being grouped in with men (or not! Again, there’s no wrong answers here. It’s about what makes you feel least weird or icky, really.)But maybe both options feel equally uncomfortable/comfortable (or maybe it depends on the day? In that case, definitely choose a site that will allow you to change your gender as needed! But I digress…) If both options feel essentially the same to you, you’ll want to ask yourself:

Which option will cause you to be seen by the best potential matches? Online dating is a numbers game, and people get matched up algorithmically. In general, being up-front and honest is the best way to find people who are actually interested in people like you, but stuck between two inaccurate choices, it’s reasonable to pick the one that’ll yield the best results for you. So consider whether someone who is looking for men or for women will be more likely to click through to your profile based on the summary/profile picture when browsing. Or, consider whether the people most likely to click through in each case are more likely to be the kinds of people you *want* clicking on your profile – maybe you know that you tend to get more interest from people who are into women, but you’re more interested in connections from people who will dig you for more manly qualities? Then put yourself in with men and let the chips fall where they may!

OK, but how do I let people know that I’m non-binary?

Some sites do actually let you set your gender as non-binary (or as more specific identities under the non-binary umbrella), and that can be helpful, but you should also be aware that most people browsing the site will gloss over that part of your profile, and may (somewhat reasonably) assume that you ar the gender they clicked on as “searching for”, given that that’s what they asked for.

Unfortunately there’s no way to make sure the people messaging you notice that you’re non-binary, or prevent yourself from getting misgendered. A lot of people take a scattershot approach to online dating and will just fire off the same opening message to anyone the algorithm sends their way without even looking at their profile. More and more dating apps are setting up barriers to this method, requiring mutual ‘likes’ before messages can be sent, but still the scattershot-rangers just go around liking everyone and sending out their form messages as soon as they get a notification of a mutual like.

But, if you’re like me, you can choose to see this as a bit of an advantage. As a non-binary person it will be even easier for you to immediately identify the people who didn’t even give your profile a cursory glance, and avoid wasting your time on them!

The last time I had a dating profile (before I broke up with OKC for good this time, after the insultingly condescending way they tried to phase out usernames (yes, I realize they walked back the policy almost immediately, and you literally can just use any username as your ‘name’, but it was a nail in the coffin for on top of my other ongoing complaints), but I digress again…) I was very upfront about both being non-binary, and that I had no patience with being misgendered.

I’m not on dating sites to do gender 101 with random strangers who just want to get into my pants. I do that work here (and I actually used to link to this blog from my profile, so if anyone was actually genuinley interested in my thoughts on gender, they were right at their fingertips!). I don’t have the exact wording anymore, but if I was writing my “I’m non-binary” disclaimer today, it would be:

In case you missed it at the top of my profile (who reads those anyway?), I am a non-binary person. My pronuons are they/them/their. I don’t date straight people (#sorrynotsorry). I also have a zero tolerance policy on being misgendered by potential dates (that kind of intimacy requires a higher standard than just a rando on the street!), so consider yourself warned!

I try to find a balance between being setting a very clear boundary, while maintaining a conversational/pleasant tone. It’s… hard, and there are people who will automatically read anything you have to say about being non-binary as confrontational or as you being difficult, but if you’re like me, you will also see this as an advantage – these folks will either show themselves the door, or show you their asses immediately, avoiding wasting too much of your time!

Just be direct and honest. You don’t need to write an essay on your genderfeels (though you can if you want! Some people are into that!), and you can gauge your own level of aggressiveness in setting any boundaries you have around being misgendered (or whether you want to date straight people! I know some non-binary people do!), but if it’s important to you that people know youre non-binary before you go on a date with them, just put it out there.

Gender always factors in my future plans at least to the extent of whether or not I plan to be out about my gender in x, y, or z context, and if so, when. Speaking of which, I am now 2/3 of the way through my probation at my current job, so maybe as soon as a couple of months from now? I am also considering waiting until next year’s Trans Day of Visibility, but that may just be a procrastination tactic on my part. We’ll see?

But yeah. I mean, I feel like I might be harping on this a bit and all (though maybe I am harping more in my head than in writing, so it may bear repeating here after all), but the place where my gender looms largest for me in terms of future plans is around this whole thing where I am really hoping to find someone who wants to raise kids with me.

The thing is that while I am open to a totally platonic arrangement in this regard (and can even see some advantages to such a thing), I also now that most people aren’t. Most people are actually pretty attached to getting their romantic (and sexual) and family-making needs/desires met in one package.

Which means I am thinking a lot about how my gender impacts my current and future date-ability. And it kinda sucks. Trawling OkCupid for people who are open about wanting kids is some depressing shit. I usually keep my searches open to those who set their settings both to “wants kids” and “might want kids”, but the honest truth is that all of the patience I may ever have had for people who might maybe want to have kids at some magical future ‘someday’ got used up a long fucking time ago. When people are in their freaking thirties and still dicking around on “I don’t know. Maybe?” on a question like that, I just fucking can’t. (And I mean, look, I don’t actually mean to criticize you if this describes you. You get to not now what you want, or you get to be unsure about whether it is possible for you fit kids into your life, or whatever else. Just, we would not be compatible right now, because you would make me crazy, is all.)

And then there’s the fact that even the folks who say they want kids are very often straight. I am sure I have no shot with straight women. I do with straight men, but the idea of dating straight dudes gives me pre-emptive dysphoria at this point, to be honest. The risk of being made to feel invisible, incomprehensible, and/or just generally like shit is too high.

And of course, even if I did want to to risk all of that, I know that plenty of folks wouldn’t want to date me anyway because of my gender. or they would want to, but maybe they would make me a secret or misgender me behind my back because they didn’t want to be out about having a trans partner or whatever? I mean, I know a lot of this is useless anxiety-brain speculation, but also these are real things that people do, and I am not even remotely capable of handling that kind of bullshit right now.

In my worst moments, I have honest-to-goodness considered a sort of detransition. If I just say I’m a woman, than my prospects would open up. I could be less difficult, and require less work from potential partners. I could date people who don’t care about social justice, I guess.

Except of course I don’t want any of that. Of course I don’t want to date someone who would not date me if I was honest about who I am. And of fucking course I don’t want to raise kids with someone who doesn’t understand social justice issues.

And even if I was willing to make that many compromises, the thing is that every time I think about it, it is clear to me that I can’t. I can’t go back to pretending to be a woman. It would destroy me.

So here I am.

I kind of got away from the original prompt there, maybe, but anyway, yeah, these are the things I think about when I think about my gender and my future.

There is a thing I see a lot in dating-related online spaces and real life events that makes me uncomfortable. But I can’t decide whether I outright condemn the practice or not.

This concerns non-binary people and the ways in which we navigate the often overtly binarist mechanisms of organized date-finding spaces (for lack of a better term?) Again and again, I see (afab) non-binary people responding to ads from people explicitly seeking female partners or women (depending on how they choose to word it), specifying that they are afab and checking to see whether they count or qualify or whatever. It is possible that amab enby folx do this as well, but I haven’t really seen it so I can’t say.

And this icks me out. On more than one level, really, and the levels actually contradict each other. Because it feels like these people’s thought process may actually be “well, I have a vagina so maybe that’s must be close enough” or something. And that’s sad and fucked up in multiple ways.

On the one hand, I feel your pain, fellow enbies trying to figure out who might want to date you in a binarist world – OKC only tells me whether people are interested in men and/or women, and unless they make a point of mentioning in their profile (rare), there’s no way for me to know how they will respond to an enby like me.

But on the other hand, can we like, just *not* contribute to the idea that if someone says they are into women, that means they are into people with vaginas? Because that is cissexist on so many levels. It is flat out transmisogynistic to equate those concepts.

I know that a lot of the people who say they are into women really do mean they are only into vaginas, and that’s why you want to clarify. But here’s the thing: why the fuck would you want to date someone who is that cissexist? Do you really believe they won’t misgender you? Do you really want to enable someone else’s transmisogyny?

Every once in a while I will get a message from some dude on OKCupid who wants to know if he can ask me some questions, because y’know, he’s just a straight shooter, the kind of guy who lays all his cards on the table. He probably doesn’t mince words either, and maybe he just wants to get right to the point.

Anyway, the point is, he wants to know about my junk. And what kind I have.

Mostly I don’t super care about these questions – my standard response is “None of your business, since if it matters to you, then I’m not interested anyway.”

But sometimes they manage to be extra creepy about it. The most recent dude, for no apparent reason, made a point of letting me know that he had scoured my profile and all of the photos I included, but that he had not been able to determine on his own what my genitals looked like.

I suspect that this is because I, shockingly enough, have not included and photos of my genitals on my OKC profile. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be allowed to even if I wanted to. Nor do I describe my genitals in any of the written sections of my profile. Go figure.

But more to the point, my PSA of this day is:

Unless you are looking at a person’s genitals, or a picture of their genitals, no amount of searching their appearance for ‘clues’ or whatever will allow you to tell what genitals they have. The fact that so many people think this is possible is because they are cissexist douches.

My primary response, which is that my genderqueerness is actually important to me, and someone down-playing its role in my life and relationships isn’t really a good thing either, also missed the big picture, though.

I’ve since realized that my genderqueerness impacts my relationships in ways that go well beyond questions of allyship and affirmation. The thing is, even someone who totally gets me, and is into me and everything, might (unless they are genderqueer themself) ultimately decide that pursuing something serious with me is nor worth it. Because I am genderqueer.

Let me explain that.

What my genderqueerness does is makes the bar higher even when people are into me, because by dating me (and especially, y’know, parenting with me, since that is the thing I am really looking for), they will have to have more awkward conversations, potentially face bigotry, and their lives will be made harder in many of the ways, big and small, that being genderqueer makes my life harder.

Choosing to be with me isn’t just about choosing me, it’s also about deciding I am worth dealing with all of the other crap that comes with me, which I can’t wish away, but which they might decide they can’t handle.

I worry a lot about my partner: that by choosing to love me, she has chosen difficulty. She has chosen awkward pronouns, chosen tricky explanations, chosen to allow my identity as a genderqueer person to shape hers as a queer woman, chosen a life that will come with footnotes and caveats.

It matters that I am genderqueer. My life is harder because I am genderqueer, and the lives of those around me are, in some ways, made harder by their association with me.

So, yeah. Can we just fast forward ourselves into a post-cis/hetero/patriarchal world already? That would help.

I got an OKCupid message last week which contained the statement “I fully believe in being non-binary”.

All I could think was “Oh thank goodness, since we enbies depend on the Fairy Dust Principle and other people’s belief in our existence is the only thing keeping us alive.”

Snark aside, though, this sort of thing pisses me off. If the best you can offer me is “I believe that you exist”, I will not have the patience to deal with you. Particularly, as a person who wants to date me, if this is the best you can offer, you are probably going to be a major dysphoria trigger for me when all is said and done.

Like, literally, the best you can do is “Hey, I’m not going to gaslight you or explicitly deny your gender identity”? That is not good enough. Especially since I know to take literally anything anyone says on a dating site with enough of a grain of salt to translate “I fully believe in being non-binary” into “I’m willing to avoid saying anything snarky about non-binary genders for a little while if it will get me laid.”

When I was lamenting recently about how the odds are pretty stacked against me being able to find a suitable co-parent for my parenting aspirations (someone who wants to be a parent, and isn’t intimidated by the inherent difficulty of forming a family with a genderqueer person, and who shares at least some of my rad queer politics, etc), a (straight, cisgender, married-with-a-kid-already) childhood friend of mine weighed in with “who cares if you’re genderqueer?”, and made the point that obviously anyone who has a problem with that isn’t someone I’m interested in anyway.

Which, this is true, of course. I deliberately put as much of my rad queerness and all of my outlier, potential deal-killer characteristics right out front on dating profiles specifically because I *want* to scare off anyone who’s not on board with that stuff. I am not willing to compromise who I am to seem more palatable.

But, the question itself still rankles me.

Who cares if I’m genderqueer?

Lots of people care, really. The internet and the real world are both full of people who care deeply and work extremely hard to invalidate my identity at every opportunity, to insist that I don’t exist, that I’m really either a boy or a girl, that I am delusional, that I am just seeking attention. I can’t just pretend these people don’t exist or that they don’t matter.

Moreover, lots of people that I would otherwise get along with well and may be compatible with will write me off as a dating partner. Many others might be willing to date me, but won’t want to start a family with me. And I’m not even judging them for this – it’s just true, and it is just a truth that makes my life more difficult.

Ultimately, though, this isn’t even about that. That’s not why the question bothers me so much.

So, once more: Who cares if I’m genderqueer?

I care. I care deeply. I have expended a huge amount of time and effort on finding ways to authentically be who I am, to embrace my identity and my self wholly and truly, and to be comfortable in the world I have no choice but to live in. I’ve written thousands of words on the topic, and sought out the words of others with similar experiences. It’s important to me, and because of that, it’s important to me that others care too.

I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t care that I’m genderqueer. I don’t want to be liked despite or regardless of who I am. I want my genderqueerness to be valued, and to be cherished.

I’ll be honest with you. If you don’t care that I’m genderqueer, then you probably don’t even see me at all.